Reconfigurations of Class and Gender (Studies in Social Inequality) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804738416 ISBN 13: 9780804738415

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2002

Synopsis

At a time when social commentators are increasingly likely to assert the “death of class” as a source of social inequality and conflict, this far-reaching volume reasserts the significance of class and gender for understanding socioeconomic conditions. Rather than declining in importance, class and gender processes are being transformed by social and economic changes associated with postindustrialism, including the entrance of women into the labor market in ever greater numbers, a shift from manufacturing to services, and the rise of part-time employment. Moving away from the narrowly focused debates that have characterized much recent class analysis, the contributors to this book urge a nuanced approach that focuses on the specific institutional contexts of class-gender relations in various advanced industrial nations. Class and gender relationships in each country are contextually embedded, they argue, in such issues as the differences in welfare-state regimes, the varying availability of flexible forms of employment, and the degree to which the labor market is politically regulated. The essays analyze the class and gender bases of economic inequality in ways that are sensitive to nationally specific institutional conditions. Two introductory chapters set the terms of the theoretical analysis and provide a framework for thinking about the relationships between gender and class. The remaining chapters offer comparative, cross-national analyses that investigate empirical examples of the links between class and gender relations, including the changing gender composition of the middle class, gender differences in access to managerial positions, the social ramifications of flexible employment arrangements, the links between paid and unpaid work, and the increasing feminization of poverty. The contributors include Gunn Elisabeth Birkelund, Wallace Clement, Rosemary Crompton, Paula England, Siv Overas, Rachel Rosenfeld, and Erik Olin Wright.

About this title

About the Author

Janeen Baxter is Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Queensland. Her most recent book is Work at Home: The Domestic Division of Labour. Mark Western is Senior Lecturer at the University of Queensland. He is the author of Class and Class Stratification in Australia.

From the Inside Flap

At a time when social commentators are increasingly likely to assert the “death of class” as a source of social inequality and conflict, this far-reaching volume reasserts the significance of class and gender for understanding socioeconomic conditions. Rather than declining in importance, class and gender processes are being transformed by social and economic changes associated with postindustrialism, including the entrance of women into the labor market in ever greater numbers, a shift from manufacturing to services, and the rise of part-time employment.
Moving away from the narrowly focused debates that have characterized much recent class analysis, the contributors to this book urge a nuanced approach that focuses on the specific institutional contexts of class-gender relations in various advanced industrial nations. Class and gender relationships in each country are contextually embedded, they argue, in such issues as the differences in welfare-state regimes, the varying availability of flexible forms of employment, and the degree to which the labor market is politically regulated.
The essays analyze the class and gender bases of economic inequality in ways that are sensitive to nationally specific institutional conditions. Two introductory chapters set the terms of the theoretical analysis and provide a framework for thinking about the relationships between gender and class. The remaining chapters offer comparative, cross-national analyses that investigate empirical examples of the links between class and gender relations, including the changing gender composition of the middle class, gender differences in access to managerial positions, the social ramifications of flexible employment arrangements, the links between paid and unpaid work, and the increasing feminization of poverty.
The contributors include Gunn Elisabeth Birkelund, Wallace Clement, Rosemary Crompton, Paula England, Siv Overas, Rachel Rosenfeld, and Erik Olin Wright.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

RECONFIGURATIONS OF CLASS AND GENDER

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2001 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-3841-5

Contents

List of Contributors..........................................................................................................................................................................ixList of Tables and Figures....................................................................................................................................................................xiAcknowledgments...............................................................................................................................................................................xiiiCHAPTER ONE Introduction Mark Western and Janeen Baxter.....................................................................................................................................1CHAPTER TWO Foundations of Class Analysis: A Marxist Perspective Erik Olin Wright...........................................................................................................14CHAPTER THREE A Conceptual Menu for Studying the Interconnections of Class and Gender Erik Olin Wright......................................................................................28CHAPTER FOUR The Gendered Restructuring of the Middle Classes Rosemary Crompton.............................................................................................................39CHAPTER FIVE Who Works? Comparing Labor Market Practices Wallace Clement....................................................................................................................55CHAPTER SIX The Links between Paid and Unpaid Work: Australia and Sweden in the 1980s and 1990s Mark Western and Janeen Baxter..............................................................81CHAPTER SEVEN Employment Flexibility in the United States: Changing and Maintaining Gender, Class, and Ethnic Work Relationships Rachel A. Rosenfeld........................................105CHAPTER EIGHT Gender and Access to Money: What do Trends in Earnings and Household Poverty Tell Us? Paula England...........................................................................131CHAPTER NINE Women and Union Democracy-Welcome as Members but not as Leaders? A Study of the Scandinavian Confederation of Labor Gunn Elisabeth Birkelund and Siv vers.....................154Notes.........................................................................................................................................................................................167References....................................................................................................................................................................................179Index.........................................................................................................................................................................................199

Chapter One

Introduction

Mark Western and Janeen Baxter

As the title suggests, this is a book that argues that class and gender processes in contemporary societies are currently being transformed. It is also a book that asserts the basic empirical interconnectedness of social relations of class and gender. Both the transformation of class and gender relations and their empirical interconnections have their origins in a basic shift in the institutional characteristics of the advanced societies, a shift that is captured by the move from talking about industrial societies to postindustrial ones.

As several commentators have argued (e.g., Block 1990: chap. 1; Esping-Andersen 1993b), much social analysis of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was underwritten by a master concept of "industrial society" or "industrial capitalism" within which social processes were played out. From this perspective, industrial society provided the organizing context for undertaking sociological analysis, and the characteristics of industrial society informed the development of concepts and theories within sociological research. The industrial society framework had a number of characteristics that implicitly informed orthodox Marxist and Weberian class analysis. Economic activity was based on the production of goods, not services. Work was organized along Fordist lines, with mass production, a hierarchical division of labor, and highly routinized blue- and white-collar jobs with predictable careers and life chances. Male participation in wage labor was almost universal, and the male life course consisted of an orderly progression of education, full-time continuous employment, and eventual retirement. Within the household, women were responsible for the private provision of services and the reproduction of wage labor (Esping-Andersen 1993b; see also Clement and Myles 1994: chap. 1).

Within a theoretical framework defined by the concept of industrial society, it was reasonable to pursue class analysis in a highly specific way. Most notably, the "industrial society model" of class analysis tended to focus only on those who were currently in paid work, to emphasize the experiences and attributes of men rather than women, to use blue- and white-collar or manual and nonmanual distinctions to index differences between the working and middle classes, and to treat work and family as distinct and nonoverlapping realms of social life. Men carried out public sphere activities in the world of paid work while women were responsible for the private sphere. For our purposes, probably the most pertinent attribute of this industrial society model is that it allows class analysis unproblematically to ignore gender (and, more particularly, women). Within industrial capitalism, women do not "work," at least to any significant extent, and therefore can be safely ignored in class-analytic accounts of social action and inequality.

Industrial society was clearly the economic and social context informing class analysis throughout the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth. However, residues of this approach still persist today. When researchers argue that class membership can be defined solely in terms of a snapshot of current job characteristics of the "head of household" or that a white-collar/ blue-collar distinction maps directly onto a middle-class/working-class one, they are drawing on ideas that made sense within the institutional framework of industrial society. However, the advanced capitalist societies today are characterized not by the social and economic conditions of industrialism but by the conditions of postindustrialism. For this reason, class analysis can no longer assume the economic and social conditions of industrial society as a basis for social analysis. For our purposes, postindustrial societies contain a number of key features that problematize aspects of traditional class analysis. These features include the shift by core economies from manufacturing to services, the increasing entry of married women into the labor market, the rise of part-time employment and the associated polarization of working hours, changing patterns of family formation and an increasingly diverse range of household types, and enduring persistent unemployment. Some of the chapters that follow describe these trends in more detail, and all are concerned with clarifying the implications of these processes for class and gender relations.

The impact of postindustrial social change has been reflected in a number of recent theoretical and empirical debates in class analysis. In the 1970s and early 1980s, many class theorists were preoccupied with the so-called boundary debate, namely, how to theorize the class structure of advanced capitalism in response to the proliferation of new-middle-class jobs associated with postindustrial service-based economies. Although there were earlier attempts to theorize the nature and role of the middle class (e.g., Dahrendorf 1959; Weber 1982), the boundary debate focused specific attention on these issues (see, e.g., Abercrombie and Urry 1983; Carchedi 1979; Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 1979; Goldthorpe 1982; Poulantzas 1978; Wright 1978, 1985) precisely because the middle class was proving to be much more durable and socially significant than traditional class analysis predicted. Prior to the boundary debate, both Marxist and non-Marxist class analysis tended to focus on the working class (Savage 1995) and to treat white-collar middle-class employees as an essentially residual category that was probably becoming proletarianized (Lockwood 1995).

With the boundary debate, class theorists began for the first time to take seriously the possibility that the middle class was an enduring feature of capitalist societies rather than a temporary residual category that was destined to disappear. The boundary debate signaled a general recognition that professional, technical, and managerial employees are emerging groups rather than transitional ones who occupy particular locations within the class structure that empower them in distinctive sorts of ways. While managerial jobs emerged as a consequence of the separation of formal legal ownership from effective control that was associated with industrial capitalism (Hill 1981: chap. 2), the growth of technical and professional occupations that mobilize socially rewarded expertise is fundamentally associated with post-industrialism and the shift to an information or service economy (Bell 1976; Esping-Andersen 1993a).

The other sense in which the boundary debate is an accommodation to postindustrial social change lies in the general acceptance among class theorists that the working class no longer consists solely of blue-collar workers in manufacturing-the archetypal industrial proletariat-but that nonsupervisory employees in semi- and unskilled clerical, sales, and service occupations are also included in this grouping (see, e.g., Erikson and Goldthorpe 1993; Wright 1985). The shift from goods to service production leads to the development of a postindustrial working class of routinized nonsupervisory white-collar employees that complements older working-class fractions in primary and secondary industry (see, e.g., Erikson and Goldthorpe 1993; Goldthorpe and Payne 1986; Marshall et al. 1989; Wright 1978, 1985). Most distinctively, this new fraction of the working class is predominantly female (Clement and Myles 1994: chap. 2; Esping-Andersen et al. 1993b), while the industrial working class remains predominantly male.

The boundary debate in class analysis was not effectively resolved in favor of one universal conception of "the postindustrial class structure." Nonetheless, the two most influential accounts of class structure to have emerged from the debate, proposed by John Goldthorpe (Erikson and Goldthorpe 1993; Goldthorpe 1995) and Erik Wright (Wright 1985, 1997), focus theoretical attention on postindustrial middle- and working-class groupings. For Goldthorpe, the preeminent class of postindustrial societies is the service class, that group of professional and managerial employees whose employment is constructed in terms of a "service relationship" between themselves and their employers rather than a purely contractual one. Service-class employees exercise delegated authority and expertise in the interests of their employers, and their organizational commitment must therefore be secured through the service nature of the employment relationship. The defining features of the service relationship that promote organizational loyalty are the existence of stable career structures and relatively guaranteed systems of remuneration over the working life and afterward. The employment relations defining the service class can be contrasted against those of manual and nonmanual or blue- and white-collar fractions of the working class, whose employment is typically organized in terms of a fixed labor contract in which wages are exchanged for specifically defined tasks, often over a specific time period (Erikson and Goldthorpe 1993; Goldthorpe 1995).

For Wright (1997: chap. 1), the postindustrial class structure of advanced capitalism is defined in terms of social relations of production with respect to three productive resources: productive property, organizational authority, and occupational skills/expertise. Relationships of ownership and control with respect to these resources distinguish different class locations, most notably capitalists and petite bourgeoisie among the owners of productive property and managers, experts, and workers among employees. Managers and experts control or mobilize authority and occupational expertise, respectively, and along with the petite bourgeoisie represent the "middle class" in contemporary capitalism. The working class is defined in terms of employees in blue- and white-collar occupations who lack both organizational authority and significant levels of occupational expertise.

The second recent debate in class analysis that represents a specific response to postindustrial social change is the debate around the "unit of class analysis" or the "gender-class debate." This debate was sparked by John Goldthorpe's "defense" of conventional practice in class and stratification research of allocating women a class location not on the basis of their own economic activity but on that of a male breadwinner, such as a husband or father (Goldthorpe 1983). Goldthorpe argued that women's comparatively limited labor force participation meant that a woman's class circumstances were better indexed by the economic activity of a male breadwinner such as a father and husband than by her own job. Because the economic activity of the man more strongly shaped the material circumstances of the household, class-dependent outcomes for both women and men were better predicted by assigning individuals within a household class membership on the basis of the job of the male breadwinner. Goldthorpe's initial paper led to a number of theoretical and empirical analyses that attempted to specify conceptually the appropriate unit of class analysis-family or household-and to determine how married women's labor force participation mattered for individual and family class outcomes such as class identification or voting behavior (see, e.g., Baxter 1988, 1991, 1994; Dale, Gilbert, and Arber 1985; Goldthorpe 1983, 1984; Heath and Britten 1984; Stanworth 1984; Wright 1989).

More recently, however, feminist sociologists (Crompton 1986, 1996; Witz 1995) have argued that Goldthorpe's conception of a homogeneous service class as a stable set of managerial and professional positions organized in terms of a predictable firm-specific career is predicated on a particular gendered division of labor. The service class depends on women being responsible for social reproduction of the family and household while men carry out paid work. The existence of the postindustrial service class, as Goldthorpe understands it, therefore causally depends on gender relations associated with industrialization that shaped distinct male and female life courses. Other British research (Crompton and Jones 1984; Savage 1992) links the historical emergence of the service class to gender-specific career tracks for women and men in particular industries such as banking, with restrictions on promotion for women but not men, and female exclusion from higher education that restricted women's access to professional jobs.

The debate about the appropriate unit of class analysis and the subsequent recognition that certain kinds of class relations may causally depend on gender relations are significant in two respects. First, the debate concerning the appropriate unit of class analysis has salience only because the increasing employment of married women and changes in processes of family formation associated with rising divorce and remarriage rates and increased diversity of household types undermine what Goldthorpe (1983) refers to as the conventional view in class analysis. Under this postindustrial reorganization of gender relations, it makes sense to ask what criteria should be used to determine women's class locations and what implications arise for describing the class structure and addressing outcomes such as economic inequality by taking an individual or household view. Conversely, if the typical female life course involves schooling, limited paid employment, marriage, and child rearing, with permanent withdrawal from the labor market on marriage or the birth of children, allocating women class locations on the basis of their husbands' jobs is a defensible strategy. By problematizing the idea that women and men have distinctly different life courses, with only men's directly intersecting the class structure, the postindustrial transformation of gender relations increasingly draws attention to empirical interrelationships between gender and class relations. These interrelationships matter for how we conceptualize the class structure and think about the ways gender and class impact on people's lives.

Second, however, arguments that the development of the service class can be understood only by referring to a gendered division of labor involving work in the labor market and work in the family (e.g., Crompton 1986, 1996, Chapter 4 in this volume; Witz 1995) illustrate the need to examine labor market and family processes in tandem rather than in isolation. Traditional class analysis tended to focus primarily on what occurred in labor markets, and labor market processes were theorized largely independently of the private sphere. With postindustrialism and the rise of two-earner households, people's needs to accommodate work in the family and work in the labor market are much more obvious, thereby drawing further attention to the way class and gender relations intersect.

Like the boundary debate, the gender-class debate was not so much resolved as superseded. There is still no clear consensus about whether individuals or households are the basic "units" of class analysis, although, as Wright argues in Chapter 3, there are various ways of dealing with these issues that acknowledge that individuals are simultaneously located in gender and class relations and that these structures will jointly impact on their lives. England's analysis of U.S. trends in gender gaps in poverty and earnings in Chapter 8 provides a stark example of this process. Similarly, despite arguments about the causal impact of gender relations on the existence of particular class locations, there is still disagreement about how important these factors were for the emergence of the service class (Goldthorpe 1995; Witz 1995) or whether they are even legitimate questions for sociological inquiry (Crompton 1995; Goldthorpe 1990, 1995; Witz 1995).

However, although the gender-class and boundary debates were not unanimously resolved, they clearly sensitized researchers to changes occurring in the institutions of the economy, work, and family that would have to be accommodated in analyses of gender and class relations in postindustrial societies. Most class analysts, for example, now recognize that the petit bourgeois old middle class is much more durable than Marxist theory predicts, that professional/technical and managerial occupations make up core elements of the "new middle class" (however we specifically define this group), and that the working class comprises both blue- and white-collar fractions. Similarly, many researchers would accept that the economic welfare and sociopolitical attitudes and behavior of married women (and men) potentially reflect both their own and their partners' labor force participation and that the relative weight of these factors varies for different dependent variables, for individuals at different stages of the life course, and so on. Most researchers would arguably also accept that social practices within households and social practices within labor markets impact jointly on one another so that these institutional spheres need to be analyzed together rather than independently. Clement's chapter illustrates this by showing how labor market regimes in different countries reflect social understandings about the nature of work and who is or is not included within the labor market.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from RECONFIGURATIONS OF CLASS AND GENDER Copyright © 2001 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804738416
• ISBN 13: 9780804738415
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 226
• Editor: Baxter Janeen, Western Mark